09-12

Onur Özen

Orta Format

Onur Özen's photography series "09-12" is composed of images that recount a specific period of his life. The series can be argued to start spontaneously in 2009 in Çanakkale. In fact, the series take on its name by its own. Özen takes photos of people he is with, the places he has been to and he says after a while, he realizes there are photographs from the lives of the same people. So, this is the beginning of his photographic journal.

We are not unfamiliar to the idea of a photographic journal in an era in which photography is in everybody's life either consciously or unconsciously. And the protagonists consist of the photographer who draws extended boundaries for the story and those who walk around freely within these boundaries, namely the viewers. What Onur Özen creates is a journal which doesn't lose its spontaneous character and a journal that finds its own way like a narrative as well. We encounter frozen moments from a specific period in brackets. This period and naturally the photographs touch on a number of changes. Özen shows what is around him and the way he lives. Each photograph can be thought separately as a journal entry from a specific day and these entries can relate to each other just like every experience connects to another. Özen says he didn't have any difficulty in taking photos because everybody around him got used to it. And this is an essential part of the formation of his photographic journal he created without being aware of it. His refusal to think about where the process will go as to who takes the photos and what happens within the images should be crucial in the formation of the series, and maybe that is what makes this work more sincere.

It is argued that the journals are written "knowing someone will see them." This silent instinct reassures our soul relieved with sharing. Özen's experience of hitting the button as well as this journal as a result of this experience, is a trace for the photographer that he has left some things behind, and a transmission of experience for the viewer. Surely, we are faced with this experience in a simplified manner, as an experience transformed into a narrative. Özen says these are "photos that I try to avoid but cannot forsake" about the photos in the series. In other words, they are "the ones to hide more and the ones to recount more."